DESIGN OF ADAPTIVE VOLTAGE-CONTROLLED OSCILLATORS AND ADAPTIVE RF FRONT-ENDS

Today’s portable communication devices enable a growing variety of applications, ranging from text messaging, telephony and audio to full video. These devices must maintain connectivity while running multiple applications, they must track position, and be wearable rather than just portable. However, the energy supply for portables is fixed by the size and weight of the batteries in a handheld device. Consequently, the current consumption of circuitry in handhelds must be reduced in order to meet these increasing functional and concurrent operational requirements. Limited gains can be made through further improvements in circuit efficiency, radio architectures, and by sharing circuit blocks wherever possible. Another potential solution is circuit adaptivity. This requires scaling of parameters such as current consumption to the demands of the signal-processing task at hand.